What Do We Mean by Sustainability?

The Natural Step Canada’s Sustainability for Leaders Course - Level 2 took place in Banff AB, July 11-13 2011 at The Juniper Hotel and Bistro.

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Geoscience literacy and expertise play a role in all societal issues that involve the Earth. Issues that range from environmental degradation and natural hazards to creating sustainable economic systems or livable cities. Human health also involves the Earth. For instance, diseases are carried on vectors that involve water and wind, natural and human toxins in the environment impact health, and treatments for many diseases come from natural ecosystems thriving in specific Earth environments. InTeGrate supports teaching and learning about the full spectrum of issues in which geoscience plays a part.

Societal issues and geoscience

Geoscientists often think of the intersection of geoscience and societal issues in terms of:

Today we understand that these issues are linked to one of the grand challenges that we face: living sustainably on the planet. While there are many different definitions of sustainability, most share the commonalities in attention to both people and their environment and the well-being of future generations as well as the well-being of people today. We conceptualize sustainability as meeting the needs of people today and in the future while sustaining the life support systems of the planet.

"In a sustainable world, human needs would be met without chronic harm to the environment and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. This incorporates four topical themes: environment, energy, materials and resilience." Killeen, 2012, A Focus on Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability, EOS v. 93, no 1, pg 1-3

Visual representation of business sustainability as described by Financial Times Lexicon

Provenance: Kristin O'Connell, Carleton CollegeReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

"Business sustainability is often defined as managing the triple bottom line - a process by which firms manage their financial, social and environmental risks, obligations and opportunities. These three impacts are sometimes referred to as profits, people and planet. However, this approach relies on an accounting based perspective and does not fully capture the time element that is inherent within business sustainability. A more robust definition is that business sustainability represents resiliency over time – businesses that can survive shocks because they are intimately connected to healthy economic, social and environmental systems. These businesses create economic value and contribute to healthy ecosystems and strong communities."Financial Times Lexicon

What will it take to transition to sustainability?

Provenance: Karin Kirk and Kristin O'Connell, SERCReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

The challenge we face today is moving to a civilization where we can meet the needs of people while sustaining the atmosphere, water, climate and ecosystems that sustain human life. To this end, transitioning to sustainability will require:

New knowledge, tools and approaches

focus on interactions in the human-environment system (or human-technology-environment interactions)

focus is on development and use of fundamental knowledge not just for understanding but for problem solving

usually interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary

often place-based; attention to scale and cross-scale interactions

Knowledge linked to action

promote multi-directional, on-going information flow and dialogue

promote collaborative production of trusted knowledge, involve stakeholders in its creation

InTeGrate supports teaching about geoscience and societal issues as broadly as possible. However, when we talk about teaching about sustainability, we are focusing on teaching that integrates learning about problems with learning about solutions. Creating a cornerstone with the ideas above and the Grand Challenges documents is the basis for the materials InTeGrate produces. It is this cornerstone on which the InTeGrate project aims to prepare students for addressing current and future sustainability challenges by engaging and empowering them with an inter- and multi-disciplinary collaborative approach to problem-solving.

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Provenance

Kristin O'Connell, Carleton College

Reuse

This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Provenance

Karin Kirk and Kristin O'Connell, SERC

Reuse

This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.